Richard P. Phillips sees himself as a retired merchant marine. A sailor. It’s all he really wanted to be since his first taste of life on the open sea.
His boyhood experience as first a Cub Scout and later as a Boy Scout for about three years taught Phillips to be prepared, a motto that would serve him well in his adulthood, Phillips said Wednesday, prior to speaking to attendees of the 15th Annual Friends of Scouting Luncheon at the Chattanooga Convention Center.
Phillips, 63, was the captain of the MV Maersk Alabama in the spring of 2009 when four Somali pirates in an open skiff in the Indian Ocean pursued and boarded the cargo ship he was sailing, beginning a five-day ordeal that would become the subject of Phillips’ own book, “A Captain’s Duty: Somali Pirates, Navy SEALs and Dangerous Days at Sea,” and the basis for the 2013 film “Captain Phillips,” starring Tom Hanks.
Phillips was introduced after Friends of Scouting campaign chairman Jeff DeLoach, president of the Times Free Press, and Rich Mozingo, the friends luncheon chairman and president and general manager of the Chattanooga Lookouts, talked about the impact scouting made on them and their families, going back to their own childhood memories and giving accounts of how the experience carried through into their families’ lives.
In an interview prior to Wednesday’s luncheon, the Winchester, Massachusetts, native Phillips said he had never really set his sights on a career on the sea and was a high school graduate with no college plans working as a cab driver when a fare he picked up at Boston Logan International Airport told him about his life as a merchant sailor.